I would like to see if there is any general interest from the Maven community in using RDF for storing and retrieving of repository information. I switched NMaven's resolver implementation to one using RDF and am happy with the results. This implementation allows: 1) easily extending meta-data, in my case for attaching requirements to an artifact; 2) writing queries against the repo, as opposed to reading and manipulating the hierarchy of poms. This also results in cleaner, simpler code; 3) exporting all the meta-data to a single RDF/XML file, which has helped me with debugging and understanding the entire repository. A future benefit would be the ability to run distributed queries across multiple repos.
One of the implications is that while the pom is still used for building, the local and remote repositories would just contain RDF/XML files: this would, of course, be a big change. I would just like to run this idea by the general group; if there is enough interest, I would be happy to do some prototype work to see how RDF would work within Maven core. You can look at one of NMaven's core classes that used RDF here: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/nmaven/trunk/components/dotnet-dao/project/src/main/java/org/apache/maven/dotnet/dao/impl/ Regards, Shane
